How has media policy responded to fake news?

This is the first post in our blog series on “fake news”. In this series of posts, we provide an overview of the issue of “fake news” and what can be done about it.

Last week, the UK House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee launched an inquiry into ‘fake news’ which the Committee chair describes as a “threat to democracy” that “undermines confidence in the media in general.” Since November’s US presidential election, the issue of fake news stories spreading on social media has been under the spotlight, and a YouGov survey commissioned by Channel 4 in the UK found that only 4% of people were able to correctly identify fake news. The Media Policy Project’s Emma Goodman looks at how governments and companies have responded to fake news so far.

Revelations of Macedonian teenagers making money by publishing fictional pro-Trump stories, and assertions of Russian interference in the US elections through disinformation campaigns have understandably increased fears of ‘fake news’ and its impact on politics. The CMS Committee’s inquiry focuses on the impact of fake news on public understanding, the ways that different demographics might react to it, the responsibilities that search engines and social media platforms have, what is bringing about its growth, and what is unique about the UK news media market.

There is no straightforward solution. Fake news purports to be factual, and is created by people pretending to be journalists. Nevertheless, without getting into philosophical questions about the nature of truth, it is clear that there is a fine line between curbing fake news and limiting people’s right to free speech. Whose responsibility should it be to decide which news is fake? Fake news tends to spread on social media, but the risk that Facebook and other private companies might by default become ‘arbiters’ of the truth is one that nobody wants to take.

Committee chair Damian Collins suggested that any likely solution would focus on social media, saying that major tech companies “need to help address the spreading of fake news on social media platforms” and that “consumers should also be given new tools to help them assess the origin and likely veracity of news stories they read online.” He also told Buzzfeed News that Facebook’s News Feed would be a key focus of the inquiry, and that it could “absolutely” be the case that they could ask Facebook to attach warnings to potentially inaccurate news stories in the UK.

What are other governments doing?

It is worth looking at how other countries with upcoming elections are taking action. In Germany, efforts are focused on regulating social media companies. The country will hold general elections in September and has seen a proliferation of fake news, particularly targeted at the country’s refugee population. Lawmakers are considering legislation to force Facebook to remove fake news and incitements to hate crimes from its pages within 24 hours or face significant fines. A German politician interviewed by Deutsche Welle wants to criminalise the creation of fake news sites, which he said “weaken the media landscape and the very fabric of our state.”

In the Czech Republic, however, officials are directly taking on monitoring fake news. Ahead of the country’s general election in October, the Czech government has set up a “specialised analytical and communications unit” within the Ministry of the Interior that, as part of its work to monitor threats to internal security, will also target “disinformation campaigns.” According to the Ministry, it will “not force the “truth” on anyone, or censor media content. A tweet on the unit’s Twitter page explains that the unit will assess whether the disinformation seriously affects internal security and if so, it will respond by publicising available facts and data that disprove the fake story.

Although Italian officials have met with Facebook to discuss ways to limit fake news and hate speech, Italy’s antitrust chief Giovanni Pitruzzella has called for EU member states to set up a network of independent public agencies to combat fake news, modelled on the antitrust agencies system, arguing that it is not something that should be left to private companies to regulate.

Andrus Ansip, the European Commission Vice President for the Digital Single Market, has warned that if Facebook and other tech companies don’t take a tougher stance on fake news, the EC might have to step in. “I really believe in self-regulatory measures but if some kind of clarifications are needed then we will be ready for that,” he told the FT, while stressing on Twitter that he was not referring to a ‘ministry of truth.’ The EC has already pushed Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft to sign up to a code of conduct to tackle online hate speech which aims have the majority of potentially illegal content assessed and taken down if necessary within 24 hours.

News organisations themselves are also taking steps to counter fake news. Notable examples include the BBC which has a ‘reality check’ feature that it set up during the EU referendum which it will now make permanent, and will work with social media sites such as Facebook to combat “deliberately misleading stories masquerading as news.” French daily Le Monde has built a tool called Decodex based on a database of fake news sites that allows readers to enter a URL to check whether a story is from a reliable site or not. There are also a growing number of dedicated fact-checking sites across Europe.

Given that social media and news organisations are trying to tackle fake news anyway, is regulation necessary or desirable?

Freedom of expression advocates maintain that regulation that has the potential to affect free speech should be avoided at all costs. Representative on Freedom of the Media for the OSCE Dunja Mijatović wrote that attempts to filter out ‘fake’ stories “may just cause greater harm to free expression than any lie, no matter how damaging;” a sentiment which is echoed by IFEX . Article 19 reminds readers to be “mindful that prohibition of “fake” or “false” news has often served as an instrument to control the media and restrict editorial freedom.”

Fake news is considered particularly dangerous during election campaigns. But although the majority of Americans surveyed by Pew Research in December 2016 believed that fake news is causing a great deal of confusion, another Pew study found that traditional broadcast media were in fact the main source of news for most during the 2016 US election campaign. Researchers from NYU and Stanford concluded in January 2017 that “for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads.” As Charlie Beckett stressed, when considering disruptive election results, it is important to remember that the politics of the candidates is usually the decisive factor, rather than assuming the media is ‘to blame.’

According to BuzzFeed News, fake news isn’t actually as prominent in the UK as it is elsewhere, because of the country’s highly partisan press. Its analysis of UK social media habits concluded that “the most popular dubious stories on British politics were almost always the work of long-established news outlets and relied at most on exaggeration rather than fakery.”

What options might the CMS Committee recommend?

Encouraging Facebook and others to flag stories of potentially suspect origin seems to be the most likely course of action that the CMS Committee might recommend. Although this would allow social media companies to have a say in what is true and what is not, it would ultimately leave the public to decide.

Consequently, it is worth highlighting one of the most difficult but key questions that the inquiry asks: “How can we educate people in how to assess and use different sources of news?” Increased digital media literacy would effectively nullify many of the risks of fake news without a need for restrictive regulation. But achieving this is a huge challenge with no clear response.

The second post in this series will look at the business model of “fake news” and explain how they become lucrative for the online advertising industry.

This post gives the views of the author and does not represent the position of the LSE Media Policy Project blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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5 Comments

For the purposes of accountability, each post to social media should have a unique, traceable identification number. This will be helpful for identifying “organized” posting of fake news. News originating organizations and media ratings organizations should also find the idea appealing for a different reason. The best way to measure and understand the life cycle of a news item (video, article, graphic, interactive, …) is to give it a unique identification number. Considering that the main victim of so-called fake news is legit news, journalism has an incentive to participate in such an effort.

[…] Whether and how governments should act are important questions and although there are no clear answers, many agree that increased media literacy is crucial for tackling the fake news phenomenon. Damian Collins, chair of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport committee which recently conducted an inquiry into fake news, maintains that citizens and consumers should “be given new tools to help them assess the origin and likely veracity of news stories they read online”. The need for media literacy is not new, but the terms on which it should be defined, addressed, researched and promoted should be different. […]

[…] Governments should be wary of responding too quickly with regulation, Moore said, adding that the German and Czech governments might have reacted too fast by proposing legislation to introduce large fines or creating new […]

What an obvious sham article. Social media isn’t the source of fake news, it is simply a useful foil. The idea that we live in democratic times gives the article away as a laugh early on! What is the use of ‘free and fair elections’ if people are so effectively marshalled on who to vote for. Nowhere could this be more clear than the double failure of the two Jesus like characters of Corbyn and Sanders who represented the masses, yet both failed to get elected in the face of who? An orange clown and a sinister Tory figure, both of whom have absolutely no intention, history or manifesto for making changes that benefit the masses! Media serves it masters and for sure there’s no money to be made in making things better for the masses.

Most people could tell you that there is very little confidence in our media or Government and that they compliment each other perfectly in terms of delivering fake news.

One does not have to look further than ‘Manufacturing Consent’ to see that whatever is in the media on any particular day is not representative of what is going on in the world. Manufacturing Consent gives a voice and wings to the idea that many people have had for a long time .The media is a sham, but at least somebody has had the ability to quantify it and expose it for the well organized, unified, money driven, undemocratic waste of time that it is.

Social media may represent a modest threat to the traditional powers of disinformation and propaganda, such as Government and intelligence services, but given the main stream media is now completely unified in its voice, it shouldn’t be long before social media is brought under control.

I could not read more than about 10 lines of this filth. The author is either woefully ignorant of the way in which media really works or is artfully obscuring and muddying the waters even more. Either way it is worrying to read such lightweight confusion with such an eminent brand name of the LSE.

Doubtless this comment won’t be posted.

There is no democracy unless you are willing to listen to views that don’t agree with your own.